Yes, indeed! Also kind of absurd to lock one enigneer behind two of those, opinion polls and smear campaign plans, without giving the slightest hint in game about how to obtain them. Without this forum I would have thought for weeks and weeks that they someday pop up as a mission reward. But they just don’t, never (at least opinion polls).
Yes, indeed! Also kind of absurd to lock one enigneer behind two of those, opinion polls and smear campaign plans, without giving the slightest hint in game about how to obtain them. Without this forum I would have thought for weeks and weeks that they someday pop up as a mission reward. But they just don’t, never (at least opinion polls).
I honestly think these things should have a massive drop rate boost, almost to the point of being guaranteed, in particular very specific states.
Settlement defence plans: sec ports in bases that are pending war.
Smear campaign plans: cmd ports in bases that are pending election and controlled by authoritarian governments.
Opinion polls: hab ports in bases that are pending election and controlled by social governments. (maybe have these ones available during the election too, it's only a 2nd tier engineer)
With how many random items there are I think data ports should just offer ~10 useful data +~5 junk data not used in engineering.
The catch would be that they become inactive after you download 3-4 things and can maybe get 1-2 more by spending an E-breach.
Giving players an either-or choice on loot is something roguelike games do to mitigate RNG so the game is still fun when there's a lot of items in the pool and Odyssey could benefit from that a lot since there's too many types of data.
Having settlement/faction state matter more like with HGE's is cool, but it'll still be frustrating for the rarer state/settlement type combos without this.
Ok, I had quite a bit of luck now with this which I want to share to potentially help others. I went to this settlement https://inara.cz/elite/station/350958/ that was said to spawn opinion polls more often than other settlements on reddit. Got there in my Krait Phantom and could comfortably auto dock on its medium landing pad. Switched to a weaponless Maverick suit and went to data port 5 in the habitat bar that is freely accessible. You can find it easily via the local terminals. Got scanned in the bar, all good, went to the data panel on the wall in the bar and voila, 1 opinion poll to download. This took 5 secods, then I left the bar and flew to my fleet carrier where I did the sell / rebuy loop with my bartender 10 times. By this way I had the Kit Fowler unlock in 30 mins total. 